Nightmarish BBC report about Romanian girls being sex trafficked to UK

[Slothtoes]

It just doesn’t bear thinking about. This is organised crime on an industrial scale. UK men as the end consumer rape these girls.

We need much much tougher government action here and in Romania. Sex work is brutal criminal exploitation. It’s not ‘work’. It’s organised rape forced by threats of violence, kidnap, drugging and brainwashing female children. It’s horrific.

Report quotes UK police trying to intervene but having to return Romanian girls to a known brothel here because ‘prostitution is legal’ here in the UK. How do we stop female children and women being brutalised like this? What laws do we have to change? It’s heartbreaking. If market forces are causing these crimes, what can we do to use the system we live in against this? This is toxic masculinity, poverty, misogynistic crime and indifferent governments directly attacking girls as young as 10 years old.

Thank you to BBC reporter Jean McKenzie for spending two years researching this incredibly disturbing issue. I don’t even know if I could even watch the full documentary, it’s so distressing. The full documentary is called ‘Sold: Sex Slaves for Sale’ on BBC iPlayer.
This is the news report: www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-60091717

@MargaritaPie

"Running a brothel isn't legal"

Just to clarify on this, it isn't legal to work in a brothel either (that also counts as "running" it).

That's not correct.

It is not illegal to sell sex at a brothel provided the sex worker is not involved in management or control of the brothel.

I think you are one of the posters who regularly trots out the scenario of how unfair it is that 2 prostitutes sharing a flat can be done for running a brothel. That's because they are running it. The women this report is concerned with would not be charged with brothel keeping.

@MargaritaPie

"Maybe the problem is with regard to trafficking, what counts as trafficking? Is it legal to come to a country voluntarily to do legal work"

Trafficking means you are forced/against your will. It has nothing to do with being from another country.

If a woman is forced to do prostitution in her own home, she is trafficked.

If a woman travels to the other side of the world to do prostitution on her own free will, she is not trafficked.

Yes, that's my point. If the women won't say they are there against their will, it's going to be very difficult for the police to prove trafficking.

And as long as prostitution itself is legal they aren't arresting them for that.

As for being in a brothel, yes, that is illegal, but that also has to be shown to be what is happening and it's not like there is going to be an easy to find paper trail, and if the women won't say, that avenue isn't open either.

I don't understand. Highly education, affluent, middle class liberal-progressive feminists tell me that sex work is work, and its all about choice, bodily autonomy , agency and empowerment shit, and anyone who disagrees is a filthy SWERF who deserves to be surrounded by masked protestors and intimidated out of expressing their filthy SWERF views.

But girls and women being trafficked makes it look like the sex work is a really crap and nearly no woman wants to do it, but lots of men want them to do it, so they have to traffick unwilling women to do that, and the industry is run by men who hate women and regard them as objects to be used for male gratification regardless of the trauma to the woman or girl.

Its hard to know who is right and who is wrong.

@BrieAndChilli

I do not understand why men want to have wed with a prostitute. I would like to think that none of the men I know would want to have sex with someone who is only doing it for the money or worse been forced into it but I just know some men who would be cause otherwise there wouldn’t be such a demand for sex trafficking!

What makes it worse for me - and I understand my response is a wholly emotional one as mum to a DD 13, so I do not mean to minimise the horrific exploitation of women in this - is its more than "prostitute", this is talking about children. Some as young as 10. I can't begin to comprehend how the youngsters and their families can ever recover from what happens to them.

And yes OP ... the end customers are men in this country. Someone's dad, brother, uncle or son.

@Shehasadiamondinthesky

Also why I will have nothing to do with any man who watches porn or engages in the paid sex of ANY kind, I'd rather be single for the rest of my life.

And this is why for me, porn is an absolute deal breaker. Nowadays we know that as content is often amateur footage that can be uploaded easily and in some e cases live streamed there is no way of telling whether the woman/girl on screen has consented. Or been coerced. No way. So if you consume this content you are actively a part of the supply chain and that is unforgivable.

I'm sure someone soon will be along to correct me and remind me how empowering it can be, some women watch porn too, yada yada.

I agree with all of that. It’s all part of the same abusive deal.

objectnow.org/prostitution/
Some links and further reading here on this general issue of prostitution (not specific to trafficking children and women to the UK for local men to abuse though).

I want to write to my MP after seeing that horrific news report- and I haven’t been able to get the courage to watch the documentary.
Obviously I’ll ask the MP to watch the ten minute BBC news report, if not the documentary. I’ll also ask them to visit this website: nordicmodelnow.org/
There are a list of asks on the ‘what is the Nordic model’ page, for legal change around prostitution. MPs could work on those.
What else? Policing changes? Financial support to get children and women to safety?

Thank you for your recommendation @Slothtoes.

As long as prostitution itself is legal I think it will be very difficult to control at the organized crime level. Because to be a successful organized criminal, you have to have a system, be smart and ruthless and have resources, and people like that will find ways to get around the police and make their money.

If it becomes illegal then it's possible to prosecute the punters who in general don't have those kinds of resources, and it will also discourage those who are just less thoughtful about the whole thing.

I think the reason why a lot of men (and women) are pro legalising prostitution is because they’ve fallen for the happy hooker narrative that’s pushed by the media and few high profile sex workers who are usually in a very privileged position compared to your average brothel worker or street walker. They also incorrectly presume that legalising sex work means women will be safer as there will be no sex tracking/pimps and they can report abuse more easily, but from what I’ve heard about other countries where prostitution was completely legalised, this was the total opposite of what happened, more women were trafficked and forced into prostitution as the demand grew and surprisingly it’s not a particularly attractive job so there was a shortage of willing women entering the “profession”.

What I don’t understand about people who push the “sex work is like any other work” narrative is that considering it is a job that almost any woman could do with next to no start up costs, training, education, job interview etc, and it is often is extremely lucrative (unless all your money is taken by a pimp or spent on drugs), you’d think a lot more women would do it. However, it never seems to be a career choice made by women from stable backgrounds who aren’t impoverished, coerced or addicted to drugs, I wonder why that is?

Absolutely elsie. Until hoards of men start getting into the game as a career choice then it's all bollocks. Dangerous, damaging bollocks.

It's because in western culture we've already made transactional sex pretty normal. If it's ok for me to go to a sex club and bang six guys blindfolded while I'm drunk or taking drugs, getting paid for it isn't much different. And of course pornography is legal and even some mainstream film and tv have material that is basically pornographic, and that is actually considered aspirational for a lot of people. And many people will argue that it's vital that women should be allowed to consent to that kind of fundamentally transactional sex if they want to.

You can make the practical argument that it pushes people who don't want that into the sex industry, but it's still difficult to argue that the act itself is more damaging or less dignified, paid or unpaid.

That takes a lot of the power out of the basic argument that it is degrading and unhealthy.

Just a warning - I have seen a lot of people using the term happy hooker on this thread. Please make sure you don't use it when referring to another poster, even if they say they're really happy being a prostitute. I got a week long ban for doing that recently.

As long as prostitution itself is legal I think it will be very difficult to control at the organized crime level

The problem is - and will always be - how to write a law that reverses that. Well a law that actually works rather than a law which needs endless "interpretation" and becomes so unwieldy as to be useless. Given that - not matter what your beliefs may be - is has to work in the real world, which as the "war on drugs" has shown has enough of a public demand to make laws a standing joke.

Over to you.

@SerendipityJane

As long as prostitution itself is legal I think it will be very difficult to control at the organized crime level

The problem is - and will always be - how to write a law that reverses that. Well a law that actually works rather than a law which needs endless "interpretation" and becomes so unwieldy as to be useless. Given that - not matter what your beliefs may be - is has to work in the real world, which as the "war on drugs" has shown has enough of a public demand to make laws a standing joke.

Over to you.

I don't think you can generalize all that much about laws against prostitution, drugs, booze, whatever. Some are fairly effective and others less so, it depends a lot on how well crafted they are as well as other things like police funding, certain cultural elements, etc.

There are fairly good results in states like ours with capacity for good policing with nordic model approaches that primarily target clients, and that's what I'd be looking at. It's also necessary to try and influence the social level as well. Many laws - almost all - are imperfect, what we are looking for is the best esults, not perfect ones.

There are fairly good results in states like ours with capacity for good policing

Oh dear.

Well, we can dream.

It's relative, isn't it. Some places don't have police at all, or they are just some local guys, or alternately, the army. The same proposal may be completely impossible in places like that.